nep.pgelhausen@ames-vmsb.ARPA (10/11/85)
From: nep.pgelhausen@ames-vmsb.ARPA Startup on a new (for the recent past on SF-L) topic: Time Travel Re-reading _The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat_ (the original trilogy in one volume) I come across an aspect of time travel that I have thought about before, but never quite seen addressed. That there are really THREE types of time involved when dealing w/ time travel. Objective time is the standard time around now....and what we are traveling IN. Subjective time is your personal history. Meta time involves time-travel events. To elucidate: Pierre Boulle (in his story Time Out of Mind) covers subjective time fairly well: Person A kills Person B somewhere in the past....then Person A continues to the future, where he is killed by (you guessed it) Person B, who then continues back the past where he is killed by Person A. Each Person kills the other before he is killed by them (subjectively). Meta time travel involves things like "Time Barriers", in The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World, (the third book), he cannot travel back before 1807 (or so) because The Enemy has set up a time barrier. Thus he cannot travel back to 1800 or so, arriving before the Enemy does, and defeat him that way. The Meta aspect is: At some "time" there was no barrier to travel before 1807, and at some "future" time there will again be no barrier. HOWEVER, for the (meta)duration of the barriers existance, NO ONE may travel back before 1807 regardless of whether they are (objective) 100 years or 30,000 years in the future. The "duration" of the existance of the barrier is an instance of "Meta time". Has anyone any thoughts on these three distinctions? Has anyone seen a story where all three are brought into play? (Objective and Subjective time are dealt with frequently, but Meta time seems to be ignored (and rightly so...it would be a difficult concept....can you now imagine traveling in Meta time??? You could travel to (objective) 1800 by FIRST traveling back a month in Meta time, to "before" the barrier was put up...)) -Richard Hartman max.hartman@ames-vmsb ------
throopw@rtp47.UUCP (Wayne Throop) (10/14/85)
The referenced posting defined objective time, subjective time, and meta-time. I note that meta-time has been treated in several stories, a notable one being "The end of Eternity" by Issac Asimov. However, I find that the introduction of Meta-time is the tip of an infinite-regress iceberg. Meta-time is simply a "higher order" objective time. As mentioned, if one could travel through meta-time, there "ought" to to be a meta-subjective time and a meta-meta-time, and so on and on. Nobody that I know of has treated this notion. I personally think that the old notion that "there are only three reasonable amounts of things... zero of them, one of them, or an infinite number of them" has a lot of merit. Therefore, I'd enjoy seeing a treatment of (what I see as) an infinite heirarchy of "objective time-lines". On the other hand, it seems much simpler and more convincing to assume that there is only one objective time, and stories that assume this seem more plausible to me for this reason. Not that many time-travel stories are very plausible... most suffer from even simpler flaws. -- Wayne Throop at Data General, RTP, NC <the-known-world>!mcnc!rti-sel!rtp47!throopw